Featherbedding In The Meat Plant

In his State of the Union address, President Clinton pledged to get rid of costly, unnecessary government regulation. Programs and rules that have "outlived their usefulness" should go, he said.

One program that has been under scrutiny is the nation's antiquated meat-inspection system. It ought not be axed entirely, but it desperately needs updating. Federal inspectors eyeball, poke and smell carcasses in packing plants much as they did 90 years ago when Chicago's unsanitary stockyards were decried in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle."

But most of the health hazards of tainted meat or poultry are caused by bacteria so small they can't be detected by the human eye. After two frightening, fatal incidents of food poisoning from tainted meat in the Pacific Northwest in 1993, nearly everyone-government, industry, consumer groups-agreed something had to be done to fix and modernize the system.

When the Agriculture Department finally unveiled its plan recently, however, it brought justifiable howls from the industry and from Republicans on Capitol Hill. The plan's designers, it seems, must have skipped the president's speech or missed the part about wanting a smaller, less-expensive government.

The plan calls for mandatory testing for bacteria by processors and other steps to prevent infection in the plant. It also would require each plant to devise and operate under a stringent quality-control program.

To go to a science-based system of quality assurance is a giant improvement. But what has the industry and the small-government crowd upset is that the old army of 7,400 USDA inspectors wouldn't be phased out or even reduced in number. In other words, new regulation is being larded onto the old-at a cost of $734 million over three years.

Agriculture Department officials apparently didn't propose disbanding the inspectors because they didn't want to upset their union. There's also pressure to keep the inspectors in the plants from some consumer groups, who don't like giving industry more responsibility for quality control.

Concerns like these, however, are no excuse for retaining unneeded regulations and regulators. To be sure, there's a need to retain some inspectors to check up on plants and their quality-control systems at intervals, but why continue to require inspectors to examine every carcass in the old-fashioned way? Does the additional cost of this layer of regulation buy the public commensurate benefits in health?

Unless the White House can make that case, it should dump the old system and focus on building a new scientific one. And if Clinton's minions aren't getting the message about cutting burdensome regulation, Congress should do the chopping.